Monday, January 26- Sandbox Deployment for Intraday Cost Schedule Updates
The Intraday Cost Schedule update functionality in eMKT has been deployed to the Sandbox environment. Users now have the ability in Sandbox to change the Availability (and Notification time) of their cost schedules intraday to better reflect the fluctuations in fuel availability and cost. This new functionality can be found in eMKT at Gen > Schedules > Schedule Availability Update. Please see the FAQs posted in eMKT for further details. The functionality is currently scheduled for deployment in the Production environment on February 9, 2015.

Wednesday, January 28- Production Deployment for new eMKT Fuel Fields
As emailed earlier today, the deployment for the new eMKT fuel fields to the production environment has been delayed to Wednesday, January 28 from 0800 hours (8:00 A.M.) to 0930 hours (9:30 A.M.) EST. Please note: As described in the posted FAQs, Users will now be required to enter Energy Fuel Type and Startup Fuel Type for their units (Both Energy Fuel Type and Start Up Fuel Type require a Fuel Type and Sub Fuel type). If data is not entered for these fields, an error message will be displayed. Please see the FAQs posted in eMKT for further details (#5 and #6 for details on the required fields and how to enter data).

The scheduled switchover of the Markets systems for Tuesday, January 27, 2015 has been cancelled due to expected weather and system conditions. The switchover will be rescheduled to the week of February 2-6,2015.

Original message:

PJM is planning on performing a Markets system switchover on Tuesday, January 27, 2015, starting at 1915 hours (7:15 p.m.). The first step will be to switch market operations for eMKT, Day Ahead, SCED, and Ancillary Services from the Jefferson to the Jefferson datacenter. There will be approximately a one hour outage to eMKT, and PJM may also switch to Manual Dispatch during the transition. The Markets Systems at PJM will be staying at the Jefferson Data Center for approximately one month. This exercise is a continuation of PJM’s switchover capability for business continuity purposes.

Please note that during the AC2 Go Live Migration on November 7 and 8, 2011, some market participants experienced connectivity issues with eMKT as a result of the implementation of new eMKT web servers and the inherent IP address change.

PJM now utilizes two diverse datacenters with distinct public IP subnets and can move market operations between sites. Therefore, these websites must be advertised under different IP addresses. If a market participant hardcodes IP addresses for eMKT, they will be unable to seamlessly pick up the site changes potentially impacting their ability to meet market deadlines for bid and offer submissions. Hardcoded IP address will cause unnecessary troubleshooting and may, in the case of firewalls, add process time to get policies updated.

Instead of hardcoding IP addresses, PJM highly recommends using a Domain Name Service (DNS) implementation. DNS not only allows for a human readable name to be associated with a system IP address, but also allows for a site switchover and associated IP change to be transparent to the end user. PJM utilizes a 30 second Time to Live(TTL) which instructs end systems to only cache the DNS response for 30 seconds, after which time it should check again for the event of an IP change. Intermediate DNS systems should also be configured to honor the TTL to avoid a caching issue on the end systems.

If you have any questions, please can contact the PJM Markets Hotline at 1 (866) 400-8980.

Sent: 1.26.2015
Subject: eMarket production system updates postponed

This message was sent to the OC, SOS-G, MIC, MRC, and Customer Information email distribution lists.

Dear Members,

The scheduled update to the market system scheduled for Monday, January 26th has been postponed to Wednesday January 28.

PJM will be deploying an update to our markets systems on Wednesday January 28, 2015 from 0800 hours (8:00 a.m.) to 0930 hours (9:30 a.m.) EST. During this time, there will be a brief interruption to the real-time data on eData and the Operational Data page. There will also be an interruption to eMKT during that time. eMKT browser sessions open may need to be restarted and any XML submitted during installation may have to be submitted again. For any issues or questions, please call the PJM Members Hotline at (610) 666-8980.